The Potomac Playmakers

BY CHRIS BREWER

The year was 1926. Calvin Coolidge was in the middle of his first elected term as President. It had been only six years since the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote. A number of entertainers who would become luminaries of stage and screen were born that year, including Jerry Lewis, Cloris Leachman, Andy Griffith, Mel Brooks and Marilyn Monroe. In Hagerstown, Maryland, the Women’s Club Inc., which had been founded a few years earlier, in 1921, was making its own entertainment news.